


Staring at the Sun

by nexialist



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:27:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25343176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nexialist/pseuds/nexialist
Summary: A girl remembers her grandmother after her death, and is struck by something ineffable.





	Staring at the Sun

I found a dead wasp on the stoop that morning. Its body was curled up so delicately on the sun-heated brick and I nearly missed it. I knelt down to investigate. It was patterned in intricate black and yellow, and it was resting on one of its wings, each nearly the length of its whole body, protruding from its tiny midsection. I could even see the stinger – a thing that had terrified me so many times while running on the playground. Now it was lying in front of me, unmoving as I stared.

A blue sneaker slammed down on the brick before my face, crushing the wasp’s body. I fell backwards and yelped, looking up to see a grinning Andrew, his blue eyes gleaming with cheeky laughter.  
“Hey, why did you have to do that?!” I didn’t mean to yell at him so loudly, but I was angrier than I expected. I wasn’t sure why.

He scoffed. “What do you care? It was dead anyway.” His foot lifted from the remains of the wasp, now an unrecognizable black and yellow stain on the brick step. “Besides, you’re getting a sunburn on your neck sitting like that.”

I hadn’t noticed, but my neck had, in fact, started to sizzle when I wasn’t paying attention. But this white hot rage for which I thought I had no reason wouldn’t stop or be ignored. “I don’t care! You shouldn’t have done that!” I yanked open the door and ran inside, yelling into the empty living room in front of me: “Mom! Andrew crushed the wasp I was looking at on purpose!”

My mother, a tall with long, dark hair, walked out of her room in a simple black dress and an unadorned necklace. She sighed, “Emilia, we don’t have time for this right now. Are you ready to go? You’re not even changed yet!”

I hesitated; I had forgotten all about that. “Sorry!” I yelled back as I ran to my room to put on my new clothes.

  
* * *  


We all entered the chapel at once, as a great black wave crashing into the brick facade and splashing outwards, people waiting by the door in sweltering suits and dresses for an opportunity to re-enter the stream. I grabbed my mother’s hand as we were pushed and jerked by the waves, and I tried to stay afloat.

Signs directed us to a small room in the back of the chapel, and we entered to see my grandmother’s casket upon a table across from the door, adorned with cards and flowers gushing with sympathy. There were posterboards on easels scattered around the room featuring photographs of her: cooking dinner one night, playing with my mother when she was a baby, traveling with my grandfather to Stonehenge and the Globe Theatre.

My mother wanted to chat with some of our family, and I soon tired of holding her hand and standing still. I started to wander around and look at more of the photos. I loved the most those showing her smiling in in some foreign country, adorned with a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses nearly the size of her face. All the while I kept rubbing the pendant I was wearing between my fingers. She gave it to me, and it was my favorite: a figure of Jesus hung on a small golden cross. She wore one just like it, which was really why it was my favorite.

Grandma used to love to tell me about the places she had read about in some of her travel magazines and great tomes of world history. We would sit in her small living room, each with a cookie and a drink of choice (mine was milk, hers jasmine tea), and she would tell stories of the great heroes and the ancient places. Usually she read to me from a book, but sometimes she would describe an event as if we were there, standing among the Spartans fighting for Thermopylae, with the smell of iron and copper in the air, or sailing the Niña on the wide, boundless sea.

Joan of Arc was my favorite. Hers is the story of a peasant girl who drove the English from Orléans and Patay, coronated King Charles VII at Reims, and nearly recaptured Paris for the French, all inspired by a vision of three saints when she was 13. She had lived more in her three years of service to the French crown than most people do in 80.

I didn’t like the ending to the story; at 19, she was captured by the English and thrown in a secular prison, a violation of chruch law. She stupefied the court with, it was said, a defense that could only have been divine, despite an illegal denial of her right to an adviser. But her court transcript was falsified, and her tribunal was stacked, and in the end she was burned at the stake, once to kill her, and twice more to reduce her to ashes and ensure everyone knew of her death. They were thrown into the Seine to disperse to the sea. I would complain to my grandmother that Joan shouldn’t have died like that, and it was unfair, and my grandmother would only sip her tea and nod.

She used to say that, of all the places she had heard, she wished to see the statue of Christ the Redeemer, towering over Rio de Janeiro like a guardian, promising forgiveness and passage into Heaven for all living in his shadow. She would grip the crucifix she wore on a tight chain around her neck and tell me that it would be a pilgrimage. I tried to remember the last time she told me that, and I thought it was maybe a month before my grandfather died.

My mother found me and we got seats near the front of the room, illuminated by sunlight colored red and green from stained glass. The sun was in my eyes and I asked to move, but my mother didn’t hear me, and soon our pastor appeared behind the small podium. He spoke for many minutes and I tried to listen, but my gaze wandered. I looked up at my mother’s long, black hair, and noticed a few strands behind her ears were grey. I glanced at my brother on the other side of her, fidgeting in his seat and playing with his curly, jet-black locks.

I found myself examining the stained glass windows, depicting scenes of love and piety. The windows were mostly shards of red, green, yellow, or blue, but I noticed that the sunlight blazed through a gap of clear glass. The sun transfixed me, and I found myself staring directly at the unfiltered light. Once I saw it, I felt drawn in, like there was something there I needed to see, a truth that was screaming at me just to be heard as a whisper, so quiet I couldn’t make out the words. My eyes hurt, they watered and tears dripped down my face, but I could not look away. Sadness, a sense of loss, overwhelmed me, for my grandmother and what must be so many others --- I had no idea how many. I felt hot and started sweating, and my eyes unfocused. The detail in the glass faded to oblivion, first the color then the figures, drowned in the blinding star from which I could not wrench my gaze, a fist gripping my heart and squeezing, my throat tight and strangled, and still my eyes stared at the truth behind the window which radiated only pain.

I blinked to try to clear my eyes, and the pastor’s voice came into focus. I listened to his words and my throat loosened, and I finally pulled my gaze from the light to watch him speak from the front of the room. I wiped my face on my shirt, drying the tears away. As I listened, I began to lose myself in his voice, and I forgot I had even cried. My eyes didn’t hurt anymore.

  
* * *  


My mother’s face was still damp when we left the chapel. She let Andrew and I run around on the grass beside the parking lot while she thanked other mourners for their sympathy and kind words. When she called us back to the car, her pink-rimmed eyes were the only evidence of her tears.

Andrew started babbling as soon as the car started, sharing with us his musings on the ceremony and its attendants. My mother nodded and said “uh-huh” a lot. I drifted in and out of focus, and I mostly stared out the window at the cars I would never see again.

When we were about halfway home, my focus drifted back to the one-sided conversation. Andrew was talking.

“… but I don’t think I want that to happen to me. I didn’t like the box grandma was in, and I don’t want to be in a box like that. When she was dead she seemed a lot like she was sleeping, and I don’t like going to bed. I want to stay up forever and ever!”

My mother’s eyes didn’t leave the road to look back at him, and she replied, “But hun, what would you do with forever? Wouldn’t you get bored?”

“No! First I’d read all the books I wanted to read, then I’d wait until there were real rocketships and I’d visit all the planets in the solar system, then-”

I broke in. “Mom, why don’t we go to church?” Andrew scowled when I interrupted him, but I just blankly looked at the back of my mother’s chair.

“Well, I don’t know, I guess we just never started. Would you like to?”

“Yes please.”

“How come?”

I thought about that for a moment. “The pastor’s voice made my eyes stop hurting.” I turned back to watching out the window.

  
* * *  


I awoke slowly in my chair, and raised my hand to my eyes to shade them from sunlight glaring through the window. I looked around at the clock: late afternoon. The mail should have come a few hours ago. I gripped the soft armrests of the deep, plushy seat, and pushed with all the force I could muster. I raised about six inches out of the chair before my arms failed me, and I plopped back down onto the cushion, my little cross necklace plopping back on my chest right after me. I sighed, and picked up my cane, positioned it in front of me, and in less than half a minute I was on my feet.

After waiting a few moments to catch my breath, I made my way across the rug over to my walker, which was parked next to the television across from my seat. The TV was on, which I hadn’t noticed before, displaying a handsome young man reporting the weather. It had been cloudy for some time, but the forecast now said the sky would be clear and bright for the foreseeable future.

On the way over I passed my bookshelf, and I idly read over the titles as I walked past. I had a whole shelf of religious studies, followed by two shelves of world history, the others carrying miscellaneous topics from botany to astrology. I had only read maybe a third of the ones there. After I retired I planned to read a lot, and I did for awhile, but eventually I just lost the ability to focus for that long. I wondered if I’d ever get to the other treasures waiting to be discovered, hidden between the pages of dusty books on a dusty bookshelf.

After arriving at the other end of the room, I expertly switched over to the walker, laying the cane against the wall. I shuffled it back over to the door, deftly dodging everywhere the wheels could get caught. Well, almost; some of the carpet fringe jutted upwards right before the door, and I had to balance myself on the mail table while cautiously kneeling down to yank it unstuck. With that accomplished, I slipped on my shoes and descended the ramp to my empty driveway, and began walking to the small, aluminum mailbox atop a square post, expectantly facing the road with its red flag raised in triumphant announcement. The sunlight gleamed off its body.

I reached the end of the driveway and opened mailbox door, discovering inside a bundle of papers. I pulled my glasses up and rested them on the tip of my nose. A furniture catalog, a credit card bill, two advertisements for cars, and a postcard from James and his wife, featuring the Colosseum in Rome and the words “Wish you were here! Love, James and Penelope” written on the back in her beautiful cursive. I remembered James told me she was pregnant a few weeks ago. In a few months he would be a father, and I would be a great-grandmother. But eight months seemed no different from forever, and my hand stroked the deep wrinkles on my face. I prayed that all would be well. I knew whatever God’s plan was would be for the best. It always was. I smiled.

I flipped the postcard back over and gazed at the image of the ancient stonework, and wondered about its builders. What would it have been like to watch its construction, or to sit in the audience and feel the heat on your back as you watched the great performance in the pit below? I wished I could ask someone who was there.

My legs began to tire, so I closed the mailbox and started up the driveway, making it about halfway before realizing I forgot to lower the little red flag. I turned around and wheeled back, flipped it down, and started up the driveway once more. The bright sun beat down on my uncovered neck, and I gazed up at the cloudless sky, my face sweating in the sweltering heat. I couldn’t help but look directly at the blazing mid-day sun, blazing brightly, screaming at me to look deeper. My hand desperately clutched for the chain around my neck, compulsively grasping but finding only cloth and empty air, my pupils stinging, staring at that raging star. I could not blink and could not look away, and my eyes filled with water as I fell down, curled up on the driveway, my hip pulsing with pain, tears pouring from my eyes for all that was and would be lost.


End file.
